Cinematographers are rarely thrust in front of the camera. Their focus on the wonky parameters of lens and lighting makes them the perfect candidates for a quiet life behind the scenes. Yet these craftspeople are infrequently female—another barometer of the inequalities in Hollywood currently being dissected and discussed in this Time’s Up moment. In 2016, women accounted for just 5 percent of the cinematographers on the top 250 domestic-grossing films that year.

That fact alone is why the introverted Rachel Morrison has had her name splayed across billboards on Wilshire Boulevard and thrown up on the marquee at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. This 39-year-old director of photography, who has remained happily ensconced behind the camera for close to two decades—while she toiled away on some dozen features and documentaries—is taking her place center stage as the first female cinematographer ever nominated for an Oscar for her work on director Dee Rees’sMudbound. Couple that accolade with the raves she’s getting for her work as Ryan Coogler’s cinematographer on the blockbuster Black Panther, and this moment in the spotlight has become a necessary, if slightly uncomfortable, place for her to be.

“I think I would literally go into hiding and not come out until after the Oscars if I could,” said Morrison in an interview before yet another Q&A panel for Mudbound, this time with the American Cinematheque. “It took me a little bit to sort of let [the Oscar nomination] really sink in. But it does seem to make a difference. So many women find this inspiring, and [talking about it] is telling a lot of women that they can keep it up, that there is hope at the end of the tunnel.”

Morrison’s impact was on stark display Monday night, when many female filmmakers stuck around for the late-night Q&A to ask her how she persevered when she was often the only woman in the room.

One attendee admitted to going to film school at the same time as Morrison, loving cinematography classes above all else, yet not entering the field because she didn’t see any other women doing so. Morrison, never one to consider herself a pioneer (she was an undergrad at N.Y.U. with Handmaid’s Tale cinematographer-turned-director Reed Morano), said she used her gender as an asset.

“I tried not to get caught up in the gender and equity of it all and focus on the work,” Morrison said. “I also looked at it as a positive. I would always stand out in the crowd. I chose to focus on all the things that made it good to be a woman.”

Morrison’s gender proved irrelevant on the strenuous Mudbound shoot, where her struggles with unpredictable elements, a too-short shooting schedule, and loads of mud far eclipsed the fact that she was female. Working during summer in New Orleans, the crew often would start the day in humid sunshine, only to be shut down in the afternoon when lightning storms began and generators had to be turned off. One afternoon, Morrison was tasked with shooting 100 square feet of beautiful, production-designed cotton fields (the crop isn’t grown in New Orleans anymore), only to see their manufactured balls of fluff turn soggy with an unexpected rainstorm.

“We all put our gear down and tried to help fluff the cotton up,” said Morrison with a laugh. “Finally, I just shot out of focus to get what we could. Then you couldn’t see how sad our wet cotton balls really were.”

The struggle and scope of Mudbound prepared Morrison for Black Panther—her second collaboration with director Coogler after 2013’s Fruitvale Station. (She couldn’t shoot Coogler’s acclaimed 2015 drama, Creed, because of the birth of her son.)

Black Panther also proved to be a crash course in all things tentpole-related. Morrison, who has a long track record of filming indies and documentaries, had to educate herself on the Marvel world of movie-making before taking the reins. Step one was learning how to read a comic book. “Besides Garfield in the Sunday paper, that was not my world,” she said.

Her lessons concluded with watching all the films in the Marvel universe. “It was never so that I could match language,” she said. “It was so that I knew what it was, and the hope was to see how far we could push it.”

One challenge was finding the balance between engineering action scenes that lured in the Marvel audience and creating ones that matched her sensibilities. “To me, as an audience member, movies always come to a screeching halt when they get to their action scenes,” she said. “They always feel like they drag on to me.”

To rectify that, when Morrison and Coogler were constructing an elaborate nighttime car chase that took place in Busan, South Korea, they studied the greats—Bullitt,Drive, and The French Connection—to understand exactly what made those scenes indelible.

“French Connection and Bullitt were among the first films to put you in the driver’s seat and make you feel like you were in the car chase flying down the street at 100 miles an hour, as opposed to setting the camera at objective angles, shooting cool shit of cars hitting each other,” Morrison said. “We basically stole from the best of them, and then combined that with an awesome location. Busan had that Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai-type vibe. It’s just eye candy.”

Morrison also received a top-notch tutorial in special effects, getting extra help from the film’s V.F.X. supervisor, Geoff Baumann, who sent her before-and-after shots from Captain America: Civil War that delineated what was caught on camera and what was created in post-production. She then stored all that information in her brain and went and made her version of a superhero movie—one that looks strikingly different from the others, with its crisp colors and vibrant shots.

She pushed hard for that contrast, recognizing that many Marvel films lacked that important storytelling element—a factor she discovered happened most often on the big exterior action sequences, when the weather would change midday and the filmmakers would solve the continuity problem in post-production, by meeting in the middle and washing everything out.

“I definitely watched some of the films and it was not how I wanted ours to look,” she said, adding that she campaigned to stop shooting action sequences when the weather changed and to move to interior locations. “I didn’t always win. When I didn’t, we would take out every big [light] and turn the cloudy days sunny. We took the time to just try and get some contrast going, which is not something they usually do.”

That attention to detail seems to be paying off. Black Panther has been commended for many attributes, including its cinematography, something that should help it in its quest to break box-office records this weekend.

Going forward, Morrison is optimistic—about both her own future and those of other female D.P.s. She recognizes that change seems to be happening quicker now than it did when she was coming up through the system. When she was in school, there was only a handful of women she could look up to—cinematographers such as Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Tami Reiker (Mr. Woodcock), Mandy Walker (Hidden Figures), Amy Vincent (Hustle & Flow), and Lisa Rinzler (The 50 Year Argument).

Beyond that group, there were few who followed.

“It was weird. For the better part of 15 years, there were no new women in the field,” she said. “It does seem like the numbers are much stronger with the next generation . . . and it’s about fucking time.”